This video is from the UKUncut-DPAC fuel poverty action on Tuesday.

I’m posting this because it’s about women who are struggling to meet their bills and are worried that their kids will be removed by social services because of those financial problems. I hear this repeatedly. It one of austerity’s most sinister refrains – women saying again and again that they fear women their kids will be removed because they can’t make ends meet.

Later on Tuesday, I met with another young mother who told me that she deliberated for ages when it came to asking for a foodbank voucher, because she did not want to alert social services to her financial troubles. “There’s that constant worry that they will take your kids [if they think you’re not coping].”

The truly appalling part of all of this is that the reason people can’t make ends meet is because viciously unfair and unnecessary costs have been imposed on them by an out-of-control ruling class – and there’s no political opposition to that. People are dealing with wage cuts, job losses, the bedroom tax, council tax benefit cuts, energy price hikes and plenty else besides. But the fact that people can’t magically produce a financial response to these attacks is something for which they are threatened and punished. So – mothers can’t ask for help with the financial problems imposed by the ruling class, because they fear the establishment will decide that the real problem is they’re unfit mothers who can’t budget. That is an awful position for people to be in. This is a feminist issue if there ever was one.

As the woman in the video says – (she’s from Single Mothers Self Defence in Kentish town):

“The big problem now we’re also finding is that there are so many children being taken into care, not just because of neglect, but because they’re struggling financially. It’s absolutely outrageous that the government can talk about taking your children from you, because you can’t do the most basic things such as feed your children and heat your home to keep them warm.”

She’s right. It is absolutely outrageous. But on it goes. You’ll remember recent stories about a Knowsley Housing Trust bedroom tax letter which said that social services would be advised if someone facing eviction for rent arrears had children.

I wrote then that women had also raised this concern when I was in the northwest talking to people for this article about the bedroom tax:

“The other concern people have is that social services will remove children from parents who are found to be struggling due to the extra cost. People say this a lot. “Nobody wants social services butting their noses into people’s business, because it’s a danger game when a mother hasn’t got enough money to feed her kids properly,” Jill says [at the West Everton Community Centre]. “She’s going to starve herself to make sure her kids are fed. You’re hearing about kids being taken away when they shouldn’t be.””

As I said then too –

“this put me in mind of a conversation I had a couple of years ago with a Wisconsin woman called Pat Gowens. I’d rung Pat to talk about Wisconsin’s punitive workfare programme, which she had some experience of. She and other women had set up Welfare Warriors – a member-led campaign made up of people who were fighting the demands and sanctions of that workfare scheme. We talked about that and then our conversation moved onto other work the group was involved in. That work included representing women whose children had been removed by social services. “They come into your homes,” Pat said, “usually on an anonymous call, or [a call from] your husband. They decide you’re a bit crazy, or your house isn’t clean enough – a mother didn’t vacuum her carpets, or just swept them [or something like that]. Then, they take your kids away. You used to get them back in six months. Now it can be six years. If you want them back you have to do parenting classes, therapy, anger management, domestic violence therapy.”

It is time to do more on this. Why must women live in this fear? Why must women pay for austerity with everything? And why don’t the political or media classes give a shit?

Answer:

Because if it isn’t happening to the twitterati, it isn’t happening.